A properly executed version of walking in stations would surely add to the game. Keyword here being properly. With actual things to do, even if it’s just decorating your house / home with war trophies. I don’t think CCP has the resources to do so at the moment, and probably not in the foreseeable future. Even if they did, they still have the PR nightmare that Incarna brought fresh in their collective memory.

Every thing that could go wrong went wrong with the Incarna release. Of course to start off, the version of Walking in Stations wasn’t very good. There was nothing to do except for sitting on a couch or look at your current ship in the hanger. Only one type of station room, very bad performance once inside. Character animation was horrible, you walked like a drunk and probably more issues I forgot. People were mad because it took them 3 years or so to come up with this. Lots of dev time wasted.

Then we got $1000,- designer jeans, monocles, ‘Greed is good’ and the whole thing escalated, almost resulting in the end of the game. Wilhelm over at tagn did a nice write up, no need to repeat it all again here. With this in memory most players as well would cringe at the idea of more walking in stations. Hence the current focus on space ships. And it’s probably for the best. It would take quite some work to do it well, better not do another half arsed version !

TurAmarth asks this question: “What would we encourage ALL new players to do in their first month to get them to subscribe long term, if we had to give out one set of advice for everyone (which we do if we’re giving general advice) ?”

My first reaction was to respond with ‘do a bit of everything and see what you like !’. But I think the new tutorials already do that, though of course somewhat superficial. One month is not enough to scratch the surface. After a month you get a somewhat basic understanding of the game, if I remember well. The best advice would be to join a corp like Eve Uni that is focused on learning things.

As far as other advice, all the usual things apply: Don’t afk autopilot through low sec. If a deal is too good to be true, it’s usually a scam. Actually assume everything is a scam, unless you have determined, it’s not .

Don’t fly what you can’t afford to lose. Don’t sell you battle cruiser to get that battleship, have a ship to fall back on, in case things don’t go according to plan. Save a little longer, be patient. And I think that last point is important in Eve. It’s a different state of mind that the current, I WANT IT ALL AND I WANT IT NOW trend in society. Be patient, do your research and figuring things out is, for me at least, the most fun about Eve. It’s very rewarding that way. In case that’s not your cup of tea, Eve might not be your thing, things aren’t handed over on a silver platter.

Also “Hang in there when things go sour’’ would be good advice as well, come to think about it . That’s probably the best thing I can come up with as a 9 year old vet, haha.

]]>http://www.sobaseki.com/wordpress/2014/12/13/blog-banter-61hang-in-there/feed/1Phoebehttp://www.sobaseki.com/wordpress/2014/10/29/phoebe/
http://www.sobaseki.com/wordpress/2014/10/29/phoebe/#commentsWed, 29 Oct 2014 18:48:39 +0000http://www.sobaseki.com/wordpress/?p=1355Continue reading →]]>The website for Phoebe, the patch that will be released next week, as I write this, is up. Of course the biggest change is the 0.0 movement change as it’s called on the site. It stirred up a lot of unrest on the forums. But since I have no involvement in 0.0, the Sensor scanner change is the most interesting one for me. Living in a wurmhole means you do a lot of scanning, so this change, well it’s more an enhancement really, is welcome.

Scan and display bookmarks, missions and other locations relevant to your day-to-day play. Color-coded markers and display filtering makes it easy for you to quickly spot the marker you are looking for.

And finally an endless skill queue ! About time really ;).

]]>http://www.sobaseki.com/wordpress/2014/10/29/phoebe/feed/1New wormhole and cloaking effectshttp://www.sobaseki.com/wordpress/2014/10/04/new-wormhole-and-cloaking-effects/
http://www.sobaseki.com/wordpress/2014/10/04/new-wormhole-and-cloaking-effects/#commentsSat, 04 Oct 2014 11:22:53 +0000http://www.sobaseki.com/wordpress/?p=1351Here is a little video I made to show you the new cloaking and wormhole effects in Eve.

For more details about what the blog banters are visit the Blog Banter page.
This month’s version comes from commenter Zappity who asks:

Probably been done before… What about local force projection (as opposed to the longer distance force projection that is often talked about)? I think of ‘terrain’ in EVE to be how systems are mapped together by gates. Strong tactics which exploit terrain have historically been extremely important in deciding battle outcomes. How does this apply in EVE in the presence of cynos?

Related to this, you have the option to explore the topic of wormhole systems with effects (Black Holes, Cataclymismic variablestar, etc) and if similar environmental effects on certain grids/deadspace or system wide should be explored for known space?

Terrain and space is a little hard to simulate. As Kirith mentions line of fire in his entry using structures and such, that would definitely be interesting, but usually, space is very empty. I don’t know the first thing about Cynos, so I won’t be going there.

Now regarding the effects, like wormholes have. Over at the Eve wiki you can check out the various effects. The pulsar and wolf effects would most noticeably change the environment for the battle. This will decide whether you are going in armor tanked or shield tanked. It will give the ‘home team’ a definite advantage I’d say. Other effects will affect ammo type and or weapon types.

Would this be suitable for known space ? Maybe in 0.0. In hisec if you would implement this in a system with agents, it would make mission running very trivial, or very hard. People would flock to the system with the generally known best effects, creating new over populating problems. You could of course rotate the effects, not sure if that would work. I am sure someone would come up with a website where you can check the best effect with lvl 4 agent and such.

All in all I think implementing something like this in K-space would spice things up, but in Hisec it would create new problems, and also make things more confusing for new players. Maybe try it out in a few systems first ? Or would people flock over there then ? Eve is so complicated sometimes .

]]>http://www.sobaseki.com/wordpress/2014/10/03/bb-59-terrain/feed/0Ancient Spacehttp://www.sobaseki.com/wordpress/2014/09/24/ancient-space/
http://www.sobaseki.com/wordpress/2014/09/24/ancient-space/#commentsWed, 24 Sep 2014 16:43:21 +0000http://www.sobaseki.com/wordpress/?p=1341Continue reading →]]>Yeah yeah I know it’s not Eve, but I figured people who visit this blog might be interested in this 3d RTS story driven space game ;). I started a Let’s Play series of this new game.

]]>http://www.sobaseki.com/wordpress/2014/09/24/ancient-space/feed/0Wormhole Colourshttp://www.sobaseki.com/wordpress/2014/09/23/wormhole-colours/
http://www.sobaseki.com/wordpress/2014/09/23/wormhole-colours/#commentsTue, 23 Sep 2014 05:57:48 +0000http://www.sobaseki.com/wordpress/?p=1339Continue reading →]]>This devblog from a couple of days ago explains how the wormhole colours will get updated in the upcoming ‘Oceanus’ patch. Importantly, you can still see the nebula of the system you are traveling to in the middle of the wormhole and the wormhole will still wobble to indicate how much life it has left in it. In case you’re wondering what those colours are, check out Tigerear’s blog post on the subject matter. It has everything you wanted to know and more :).

You can read more on Oceanus in this blogpost. No big changes as far as I can tell. The new cloaking effect might be nice though.

]]>http://www.sobaseki.com/wordpress/2014/09/23/wormhole-colours/feed/1Crius – Laziness exposedhttp://www.sobaseki.com/wordpress/2014/08/17/crius-laziness-exposed/
http://www.sobaseki.com/wordpress/2014/08/17/crius-laziness-exposed/#commentsSun, 17 Aug 2014 05:46:38 +0000http://www.sobaseki.com/wordpress/?p=1334Continue reading →]]>We all know that people are kind of lazy by nature, but Crius can actually show that by looking at the price index of the industry facilities used.

This is in Uedama and the systems around it. As you can see it’s about at 30%, Ikao is busier, around 50%. Only the labs are near 100%, except for the lowsec one.

Now this one, I didn’t even know people actually did production in Jita, are these people never leaving the system or the station ? Even just a system next door it’s cheaper. Or are the price differences insignificant to the end products price ?

Just something I noticed, and I thought it was amusing .

]]>http://www.sobaseki.com/wordpress/2014/08/17/crius-laziness-exposed/feed/5Taking a look at Crius IIhttp://www.sobaseki.com/wordpress/2014/07/20/taking-a-look-at-crius-ii/
http://www.sobaseki.com/wordpress/2014/07/20/taking-a-look-at-crius-ii/#commentsSun, 20 Jul 2014 07:30:19 +0000http://www.sobaseki.com/wordpress/?p=1327Continue reading →]]>The part I of the previous blogpost suggested there would be a part II and I wanted to look at the POS changes. But it seems not that much has changed. Of course the biggest change is that you no longer need standings in order to put up a POS. Or a starbase, as CCP calls them. You still have to ‘pay’ the faction in which you put up your POS with starbase charters by the way.

Another big one is that the blueprint now have to be at the POS in order to be used. So no longer training that ME from the safety of a station. I guess this was done in order to induce combat. It’s more cumbersome, that’s for sure. And people will have to be smart in moving their blueprints around.

There will also be a new POS module for losec manufacturers, the Thucker Component Assembly array, which will speed up the manufacturing process and will reduce the materials needed for Capitals, T2 and T3.

Crius is just around the corner, it’ll be released on July 22nd. It will take quite a while before the market will see it effects, since there is of course still a load of stock manufactured under the ‘old’ system. Interesting times ahead !

]]>http://www.sobaseki.com/wordpress/2014/07/20/taking-a-look-at-crius-ii/feed/0Taking a look at Crius Ihttp://www.sobaseki.com/wordpress/2014/06/29/taking-a-look-at-crius-i/
http://www.sobaseki.com/wordpress/2014/06/29/taking-a-look-at-crius-i/#commentsSun, 29 Jun 2014 19:24:12 +0000http://www.sobaseki.com/wordpress/?p=1321Continue reading →]]>From a recent CCP email (quoted here, because it has all the links to the devblogs) :

Crius links

Crius is the name of the next release to be deployed on July 22nd. As you might recall, EVE development moved away from the traditional six month expansion cycle to a much faster six week release deployment.

Crius itself brings a major change to industry in EVE Online – including changes to manufacturing and invention. As EVE is a very complex system and industry being at the core of EVE, you can expect a lot of changes that will ripple through the universe:

· The more jobs are installed in a specific star system, the more expensive it will become to install additional jobs. Centralization costs.

· NPC teams can be hired to give benefits to whole star systems, this will benefit everyone. Centralization helps.

· Material and Time Efficiency levels on blueprints will change and be capped to ME 10 and TE 20 with each level giving a fixed benefit of 1% point. Additionally all static blueprint data, such as copy and research times, will be streamlined and adjusted.

I have indeed checked out the changes on Sisi today and here are a few screenshots to show you what changed. First of all planetary colonies are no longer under the industry tab, but in the business menu.

Then of course the biggest change, the industry interface ! As you can see below, all the info is now in one screen.

No longer ME30, or TE10 but 20% time efficiency, and 10% material efficiency. The built in calculator is handy, you up the ‘job runs’ and it automatically changes the values of the materials needed, and the job duration. Once live the job cost will be affected by the number of jobs that are being run in the system and/or current facility, since it’s so empty on the test server, I can’t really tell you how expensive it’ll be. The jobs tab has your current jobs with a handy delivery button.

In the next pic you can see the avalaible teams. I assume once this goes live there will be more. If not, the systems with teams in it, will be very crowded and the price of jobs will go job, and the benefit of the team will be gone. On the second pic you can see an example what a team can do: –1 or –2% material efficiency, or –4% time efficiency. Not a huge buff, but if you make a lot of items, that need a lot of materials it might be interesting.

I also set up a POS to test things out. I’ll do that this week and will post how that works out, but so far it doesn’t seem to be very different. The BPOs you want to research and such have to be at the LAB, from what I understood so far from forums posts and/or devblogs.

Well that’s it so far. I really like the new interface, very much an improvement over the now over 10 years old, old interface. The little quality of life improvements are welcome as well of course. How prices will be influenced still remains to be seen.